The Loser (6 page)

pay her back
for everything by hanging himself only a hundred steps from her house in Zizers. He bought himself a train ticket for Zizers bei Chur and went to Zizers and hanged himself a hundred steps in front of his sister’s house. For several days they couldn’t identify the body. It took four or five days after finding the body until a hospital official in Chur was struck by the name
Wertheimer
, he connected the name Wertheimer with the wife of the chemical-plant owner, whom he knew previously as Frau Wertheimer, and, puzzled, inquired in Zizers about a connection between the suicide victim Wertheimer lying in his morgue and the wife of the chemical-plant owner in Zizers. Wertheimer’s sister, who hadn’t even known that someone had hanged himself a hundred steps from her front door, drove straight to the morgue in Chur and identified the body, as they say. Wertheimer’s calculation worked perfectly: he thrust his sister into a lifelong guilt complex through the means and place of his suicide, I thought. That calculation is just like Wertheimer, I thought. But in doing so he made himself ridiculous, I thought. He had already left Traich with the intention of hanging himself from a tree a hundred steps from his sister’s house, I thought. Suicide calculated well in advance, I thought, no spontaneous act of desperation. I wouldn’t have left Madrid to go to his funeral in Chur, I thought, but since I was already in Vienna it was natural to go to Chur. And from Chur to Traich. But now I was seriously wondering whether it wouldn’t have been better to go to Vienna directly after Chur and not stop in Traich, at the moment it wasn’t clear to me what I was looking for here apart from catering to a distinctly cheap sort of curiosity, since I had talked myself into the necessity of my being here, pretended it was necessary, faked it. I didn’t tell Wertheimer’s sister that I intended to go to Traich, and I wasn’t thinking of it in Chur either, it was in the train that I first had the idea of getting out in Attnang-Puchheim and going back to Traich, spending the night in Wankham, as of course I had been used to doing from my previous visits to Traich, I thought. I’ve always thought, one day I’ll go to Wertheimer’s funeral, of course I never knew when, only that it would happen, even though I never voiced this thought, above all not in Wertheimer’s presence, whereas he, Wertheimer, very often told me that
he
would go
to my
funeral one day, that’s what I was thinking about while waiting for the innkeeper. And I had been certain that Wertheimer would kill himself one day for all these reasons, which were constantly in the front of my mind. Glenn’s death, as it turned out, was not the crucial factor, his sister had to leave him, but Glenn’s death had been the beginning of the end, the triggering moment being his sister’s marriage with the Swiss. Wertheimer had tried to save himself by walking through Vienna without ever stopping, but the attempt failed, rescue was out of the question, visits to his beloved blue-collar districts in the Twentieth and Twenty-first districts, above all Brigittenau, above all Kaisermühlen, the Prater with its indecencies, the Zirkusgasse, the Schüttelstrasse, the Radetzkystrasse, etc., all pointless. For months he had criss-crossed Vienna, day and night, to the point of collapse. It was no use. Even the hunting lodge in Traich, which he initially saw as a lifesaver, turned out to be a miscalculation; as I happen to know, he first locked himself into the hunting lodge for three weeks, then went to the woodsmen and burdened them with his problem. But simple people don’t understand complicated ones and thrust the latter back on themselves, more ruthlessly than any others, I thought. The biggest mistake is to think that one can be rescued by so-called simple people. A person goes to them in an extremely needy condition and begs desperately to be rescued and they thrust this person even more deeply into his own despair. And how are they supposed to save the extravagant one in his extravagance, I thought. Wertheimer had no other choice but to kill himself after his sister left him, I thought. He wanted to publish a book, but it never came to that, for he kept changing his manuscript, changing it so often and to such an extent that nothing was left of the manuscript, for the change in his manuscript was nothing other than the complete deletion of the manuscript, of which finally nothing remained except the title,
The Loser
. From now on I have only the title, he said to me, it’s better that way. I don’t know if I have the energy to write another book, I don’t think so, he said, if
The Loser
had ever been published I would have had to kill myself. On the other hand he was a note person, filled thousands, tens of thousands of paper slips with his handwriting and piled these notes in the Kohlmarkt apartment exactly as he did in the hunting lodge in Traich. Perhaps it is actually his notes that interest you and that caused you to get out in Attnang-Puchheim, I thought. Or only a procrastination maneuver, since you loathe Vienna. Thousands of his notes set end to end, I thought, and published under the title
The Loser
. Nonsense. I guessed that he’d destroyed all these notes in Traich and Vienna.
Don’t leave any traces behind
was of course one of his sayings. If a friend dies we nail him to his own sayings, his comments, kill him with his own weapons. On the one hand he lives on in what he said to us (and to others) all his life, on the other we kill him with it. We’re the most ruthless (toward him!) as far as his comments, his writings, are concerned, I thought, if we don’t have any more of his writings, because he
prudently
destroyed them, we go after his comments in order to destroy him, I thought. We exploit his unpublished papers in order to destroy even more the one who left them to us, to make the dead man even deader, and if he hasn’t left us the appropriate instructions to destroy his papers, we invent them, simply invent declarations against him, etc., I thought. Heirs are cruel, the survivors don’t have the slightest consideration, I thought. We’re searching for testimony against him, for us, I thought. We plunder everything that can be used against him in order to improve our situation, I thought, that’s the truth. Wertheimer had always been a candidate for suicide, but he overdrew his account, he should have killed himself years
before
his actual suicide, long before Glenn, I thought. This way his suicide is an embarrassment, above all mean-spirited, since he killed himself right in front of his sister’s house in Zizers, I thought, above all in reaction to my bad conscience, which was still troubled by the fact that I hadn’t answered Wertheimer’s letters, had more or less ignominiously abandoned him, that I couldn’t get away from Madrid had been a mean lie I used not to give myself up to my friend who, as I now see, had hoped to receive from me his last chance of survival, who before committing suicide had sent me four letters in Madrid that I didn’t answer, I answered only the fifth, saying I absolutely couldn’t budge, couldn’t destroy my work merely for a trip to Austria, no matter for what reason. I had put
About Glenn Gould
first, that bungled essay which, as I now thought, I’ll throw in the stove the minute I get back to Madrid because it doesn’t have the slightest value. I ignominiously abandoned Wertheimer, I thought, in his greatest need I turned my back on him. But I vehemently repressed the thought of my own guilt in his suicide, I wouldn’t have been able to help him, I told myself, I couldn’t have saved him, he was of course already ripe for suicide. It must have been his school, I thought, which was a music school to boot! At first we thought we’d become famous and indeed in the easiest and fastest way possible, for which of course a music conservatory is the ideal springboard, that’s how the three of us saw it, Glenn, Wertheimer and I. But only Glenn succeeded in doing what all three of us had planned, in the end Glenn even misused us for his own purposes, I thought, misused everybody in order to become Glenn Gould, although unconsciously, I thought. The two of us, Wertheimer and myself, had had to give up to make room for Glenn. At the time I didn’t find this thought as absurd as it now seems to me, I thought. But Glenn was already a genius when he came to Europe and took Horowitz’s course, we were already failures then, I thought. In reality I hadn’t wanted to become a piano virtuoso, everything at the Mozarteum and everything connected with it had been only a pretext for me to save myself from my actual boredom with the world, from my very early satiety with life. And in reality Wertheimer behaved as I did, that’s why nothing came of us, as they say, since we hadn’t even been thinking of becoming somebody, in contrast to Glenn, who wanted to become Glenn Gould at all costs and who only needed to come to Europe to misuse Horowitz to be the genius he had longed and wished to be as he had wished for nothing else, a pianistic
world flabbergaster
so to speak. I took pleasure in this term
world flabbergaster
, while still standing in the restaurant and waiting for the innkeeper, who, to judge from the sound coming from behind the inn, was probably busy feeding the pigs behind the inn, as I thought. I myself had never felt
the need to be a world flabbergaster
, nor had Wertheimer, I thought. Wertheimer’s head was more like mine than Glenn’s, I thought, Glenn had an absolute virtuoso head on his shoulders, unlike Wertheimer and me, who had intellectual heads. But if I now had to define what a virtuoso head is, I couldn’t define it any more than I could an intellectual head. Wertheimer hadn’t befriended Glenn Gould, I had, I had approached and befriended Glenn, that’s when Wertheimer came to us, and at bottom Wertheimer always remained an outsider among us. But all three of us were, as one can say,
friends for life
, I thought. Wertheimer seriously hurt his sister with the mere fact of his suicide, I thought, from now on that hole-in-the-wall called Zizers will count the brother’s suicide against the wife of the chemical-plant owner, I thought, and the impudence of hanging oneself from a tree in front of one’s sister’s house will have even more damaging consequences for her. Wertheimer put no store in
funereal rites
, I thought, but he never would have received any in Chur, where he was buried. Significantly enough the funeral took place at five in the morning, besides the employees of a funeral parlor in Chur the only ones in attendance were Wertheimer’s sister, her husband and myself. Whether I would like to see Wertheimer one last time, I was asked (strangely enough by Wertheimer’s sister), but I refused immediately. The offer disgusted me. As did the whole affair and those involved in it. It would have been better not to go to the funeral in Chur, I thought now. From the telegram that Wertheimer’s sister had sent me it wasn’t clear whether Wertheimer had committed suicide, only the time of the funeral was mentioned. At first I had thought he died while visiting his sister. Naturally I was surprised by this visit, for I couldn’t imagine such a thing. Wertheimer would never have visited his sister in Zizers, I thought. He’s punished his sister with the maximum sentence, I thought, destroyed her brain for life. The trip from Vienna to Chur took thirteen hours, Austrian trains are a disaster, their dining cars, assuming there is one, serve only the worst food. A glass of mineral water set in front of me, I planned to reread after twenty years Musil’s
The Confusions of Young Törless
, which however I didn’t manage, I no longer tolerate stories, I read a page and can’t read further. I no longer tolerate descriptions. On the other hand I couldn’t kill time with Pascal either, I knew his
Pensées
by heart and the pleasure afforded by Pascal’s style was soon over. So I contented myself with
observing
the countryside. The towns all seem run-down when seen from the train, the farmhouses have all been ruined because their owners have replaced the old windows with new, tasteless plastic windows. Church spires no longer dominate the countryside, imported plastic silos, oversized warehouse spires, are everywhere. The ride from Vienna to Linz is a trip through nothing but utter tastelessness. From Linz to Salzburg things aren’t much better. And the Tyrolian mountains make me anxious. I’ve always hated Vorarlberg, as I have Switzerland, where cretinism reigns supreme, as my father always said, on this point I didn’t disagree with him. I knew Chur from my frequent visits there with my parents, that is, when we were traveling to St. Moritz and would spend the night in Chur, always in the same hotel, which stank of peppermint tea and where the hotel management knew my father and gave him a twenty percent discount because he had
remained faithful to the hotel for over forty years
. It was a so-called good hotel, in the center of town, I no longer remember the name, perhaps it was the
Sunshine Inn
, if I’m not mistaken, although it was located in the murkiest spot in town. The taverns in Chur served the worst wine and the most tasteless sausages. My father always had dinner with us in the hotel, ordered a so-called appetizer and called Chur
a pleasant stopover point
, which I never understood, for I had always found Chur particularly distasteful. Even more than the Salzburgers, the Churians struck me as despicable in their Alpine cretinism. I always felt as if I were being punished when I had to go to St. Moritz with my parents, sometimes only with my father, had to stop over in Chur, had to stay in that dreary hotel with windows looking out on a narrow, dank street. In Chur I had never been able to sleep, I thought, I had always lain awake in complete despair. Chur is actually the gloomiest place I’ve ever seen, not even Salzburg is as gloomy and, in the final analysis, as sickening as Chur. And the Churians are just the same. A person can be ruined for life in Chur, even if he spends only one night there. But even today it isn’t possible to go by train from Vienna to St. Moritz in a single day, I thought. I was spending the night outside Chur because, as mentioned, I had such a depressing memory of Chur from my childhood. I simply stayed on the train past Chur and got out between Chur and Zizers where I had seen a sign for a hotel.
Blauer Adler